First Things

As a prelude to a body of new scholarship on W. B. Yeats 150 years since his birth, this essay establishes context for itself and the other works in this volume. Though primarily interested in the present in relation to the future of Yeats studies, rather than to its past, I must first acknowledge the major enterprises in the field that seem at or near conclusion. The premise of the essay originated in a lecture delivered in August 2012 at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. My assignment for the occasion was to address the “state of Yeats” at that time, an assessment of where Yeats scholarship stood with “the Big Biographies and the Cornell Yeats just about wrapped up, the InteLex Letters available,” and so on. The lecture included the long–awaited Big Bibliography of Yeats by Colin Smythe, completed work on the Vision manuscripts by or directed by George Mills Harper and others, and the now almost complete Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, under the general editorship of George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran. Nevertheless, beyond the theoretical divides and possibilities of late, I addressed the revolution in new media, too, and the impact of Yeats falling out of copyright, mostly in the USA and entirely elsewhere, and, in turn, their impact on the kind of textual–genetic research on Yeats that I have been conducting for the past thirty years.

For the book at hand, in certain respects a sequel by the editors and contributors of W. B. Yeats's “A Vision”: Explications and Contexts (2012), the “state of Yeats” requires an updating from only three years ago. As ever, the revolution in media advances; but so too have books in progress on Yeats's library and the Robartes–Aherne Writings in light of an unexpected discovery of a precursor to “The Phases of the Moon,” a hard philosophical poem completed at Ballylee in the summer of 1918 although begun the year before. The coincidence of progress and discovery presents an opportunity to exhibit selections from both works.